Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

This was why relationships were such a bad idea.

For all his experience, however, he had to admit that Salley was a particularly exhausting woman. She made demands. She took up all of his attention. She melted every bone in his body. By the time she was done with him, he lacked the desire even to sit up.

To her, on the other hand, sex was clearly a tonic. It made her glow. Afterwards, she crouched over him, smiling, and, bending down, covered his face with soft kisses. “Don’t try to get up,” she said. “I’ll show myself out.”

“I really should make sure you get back to the Carnian in time to make your preparations.”

“I’m already packed. I’m cleared to take the funnel back to half an hour before the expedition departs. All I have to do then is change my clothes.”

“No, really, I can’t let you…”

“Hush,” she said. “Don’t say a word. Let me watch you fall asleep, before I go.”

Gratefully, suspecting nothing, he let sleep overcome him.

In the morning he awoke to find Salley rattling about in the kitchenette, brewing a pot of coffee. She was wearing one of his shirts, and whenever she reached for something, it rode up to reveal her bare bottom.

Griffin sat bolt upright, shocked fully awake. “What time is it? Why are you still here?” He snatched up his watch. It read 8:47 A.M. Disbelieving, he slid it on his wrist.

“Relax.” She came into the room with two cups of coffee and handed him one. “There was a change in the expedition’s roster. Lydia Pell took my place.” She put down her cup and rummaged about in her purse. “Here. I brought you a copy of that day’s traffic log.”

Griffin unfolded the sheet one-handed and stared at it in disbelief. There was no denying its existence. Yet it simply could not be. He had seen that exact same sheet (the light blue flimsies were never duplicated nor their ID numbers reused) on his desk, with “Salley, G. C.” at the top of the roster. Now her name was absent, and replaced by Lydia Pell’s.

“You were supposed to be on that expedition. Goddamnit, you were on that expedition. It’s documented. It’s certain. I signed off on it myself. It’s already happened.” He placed his hand over his wrist and squeezed as hard as he could. “You’ve created a Class One time paradox.”

Salley smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“Tell me why,” Salley repeated.

So he did. It took a very long time, and he had to oversimplify wildly, but he managed. He told her something about the Unchanging, and quite a bit more about Holy Redeemer Ranch, and went into some detail about why, though he knew who was responsible, he couldn’t simply arrest the mole who’d planted the bomb in the expedition’s supplies.

He’d expected Salley to be angry when she learned that he had been prepared to send her off on a doomed expedition. She was not. To his astonishment, she was hanging on his every word, transparently fascinated.

Without intending to, he was, he realized, playing to her weaknesses. He was giving her a glimpse behind the curtain, where the Wizard of Oz operated the secret machinery that ran the cosmos, and showing her exactly which levers were attached to what pulleys.

“The expedition is lost for good,” he concluded. “The first time, the Unchanging lent us the equipment to pull off a recovery mission. They’ll never do that now.”

He didn’t mention that, according to the final reports, they’d recovered only seven people. That three had died as a result of injuries from the bomb, and two by misadventure thereafter. The sequence in which that had happened had, after all, been sundered from the main time line. In their frame of reference, it didn’t exist.

“All of which assumes that our screwing around isn’t going to destroy the universe,” he added in bitter afterthought.

“I don’t think we need worry about that,” Salley said. “And I doubt the Unchanging are really going to loop back on themselves and decide not to give us time travel. From what I was told, things will go on pretty much as they always have, paradox or no.”

“Told! Who told you that?” He was collected enough now to ask the questions he’d dared not earlier when, in furious silence, he had thrown on his clothes and stormed out of his room. He was collected enough now to listen to her answers. “Who put such a crazy idea into your head?”

“I did.”

“What?”

She laughed a small, self-conscious laugh. “It’s a funny thing. There must be a hundred movies in which the hero sees her exact double walk into the room, and she’s always stunned when it happens. But when it happened to me—when I looked up and saw myself walk into the tent, I had no idea who it was. It wasn’t until she held up a pocket mirror and told me to compare faces that I realized she was me, only older. She told me—”

Griffin at last turned his face up toward Salley. “And you believed her?”

But of course Salley had believed her. The stranger was, after all, herself. What possible motive could she have for deceiving her? So she had agreed to drop out of the expedition, accepted the changed roster sheet, and promised to seduce Griffin after the fund-raiser, make certain he was too tired to see her home to the Carnian that night, and hand him the paper in the morning.

Nobody else who knew Salley at all well would have gone along with a fraction of that. Everyone else knew she was a terrible liar. Only she herself was unaware of how untrustworthy she was.

“It hardly matters how we got here,” Salley said. “What matters is what we do now. I think we should hop up to the future and cut a deal. Everybody makes deals.”

He shook his head. “Time travel was given to us under certain conditions. We’ve violated every rule there is.”

“Okay, so we broke the rules. That’s good! There are no more rules—they’re broken. Anything is possible now. We’ll find a solution. There has to be a solution. There always is.”

“Not in my experience.” They were, he realized, standing on opposite sides of the great divide that separates those who deal with scientific fact and those who deal with the consequences of human actions. Which is to say, those who believe in a rational universe and those who know that, given the existence of human beings, there is no such thing. “You and I belong to entirely different universes, did you know that?”

“Then come join me in mine,” she said gently. “Yours doesn’t work anymore.”

It was true. God knows, it was true. Griffin felt something shift within himself. It was the rebirth not of hope (for he had never truly felt any hope) but of purpose. “Tell me something,” he said. “What were you trying to accomplish? Your other self, I mean. What did she say to you that made you go along with her?”

Incredibly, Salley blushed.

“She told me that I love you.”

When he had finished phrasing the invitations, Griffin glanced at his watch. Two minutes before the hour. He’d hold the meeting in two minutes, then. He filled in the spaces he’d left blank, and slid the papers into his attaché to give to a courier later.

There was a knock on the open door.

“Is it just the three of us, then?” Jimmy asked quietly. He nodded to Salley, and she smiled insincerely back at him.

“I’ve invited one more,” Griffin said. “He ought to be arriving just about… now.”

Jimmy strode in the door. He stopped as he saw himself.

“This isn’t good,” Jimmy said.

His older self looked extremely sad. “I have no memory of this at all. And it’s not the sort of thing I’d forget.”

Leaving unsaid, but understood: You’ve really stepped on your dick this time. Griffin and Jimmy had worked together so long that they no longer had to say such things. Each knew the other well enough to dispense with all but the essentials.